=The nature of an economic society is not determined by its arrangements being universal, that is, applying without exception to all the families of the State, but only by their applying to what is called= _The Determining Number_ =of the families of the State: that is, in so great a proportion as to colour and give its form to the whole society.= No one can exactly define the amount of this “determining number,” but we all know in practice what it means. For instance: we say the English are a tall race, from 5½ to 6 feet high. But that does not mean necessarily that the majority of the people are over 5½ feet. You have, of course, to exclude the children, and there are a great number of very short people and a few very tall people. It means that the general impression conveyed when you mix with English people--the size of the doors and the implements with which men work, and the clothes that are produced, and the rest of it--turn upon the general experience that you are dealing with a race of about that size--5½ to 6 feet. Or again, you say that the _determining_ number or proportion of our society speaks English. That does not mean that they all speak English. Some are dumb; some speak Welsh or Gaelic. Many speak with such an accent that others with a different accent find it difficult to understand them. Yet it is true to say that the society in which we live speaks English. Now it is exactly the same with the economic conditions of society. You may have a society in which there is a certain number of slaves, and yet it is not a slave-owning society, because the number of free men is so great as to give a general tone of freedom. Or you have, as we have in England, a great deal of property owned by the State--barracks and battleships and arsenals, some of the forests, and so on--but we do not say that England is economically a State-owned society, because the _determining_ proportion of property is not owned by the State but by private people. The general effect produced is one of private ownership and not of State ownership. One more principle must be set down before we go farther, and that is that almost any society is mixed. A society of which the determining proportion is slave-owning will yet certainly have a proportion of free men; for if it did not there would be no one to own the slaves. In the same way what is called a Capitalist Society, which I will describe in a moment (and which is the society in which we now live in England) has a great number of people not living under purely capitalist conditions. It is mixed. But, though only a _determining number_ is required to mark the character of a particular society, and though every society is _mixed_ in its character, it remains true that all societies we know of, in the past or the present, fall into one of these three groups--the Servile (that is, slave-owning), the Capitalist, and the Distributive. The definition of these three systems is as follows:--